Christina Sng's Official Poetry Website

I’d been very thrilled with how I finally got the formatting right for my 3 ebooks on Smashwords. Last I successfully published on Smashwords, the Meatgrinder conversion took a whole day, with me starting at #2000+. I heard it hit #3000+ just last week before the upgrade, which today was an awesome 2 minutes! 2 minutes! I was #2-7 in the 8 attempts I made to correct the Word document, none of which succeeded.

I had just corrected a line in Dark Dreams, which was an acknowledgement to the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 18th Annual Edition for the poem The Art of Weaving, which earned an Honourable Mention in 2005. When I uploaded it in like 1 minute (!), Autovetter approved it, but it generated this error:

ERROR: dark-dreams (6).epub/toc.ncx(15): assertion failed: different playOrder values for navPoint/navTarget/pageTarget that refer to same target
ERROR: dark-dreams (6).epub/toc.ncx(15): assertion failed: different playOrder values for navPoint/navTarget/pageTarget that refer to same target

I verified it with Smashwords’ recommendation for a free ePub checker.

So I went through Mark Coker’s Styleguide again about NCX and tried a few things that didn’t work:

1. Check for TOC errors (but since it is a poetry ebook, there is no TOC so to speak but a list of poems).
2. Ensured there is no mention of “Chapter” in the document (because Meatgrinder apparently generates a TOC from there).
3. Finally, cleared all formatting and reformatted it (nuclear method).

When I check the epub in Adobe Digital Editions, the NCX seems to have added the words “Second Half” under the title under the left navigation. They are the only two lines. Looks rather odd really. When I click it, it stays on the first page, just as it does when I click “Dark Dreams”, the title.

Anyhow, I think, based on the fact that an earlier approved file is now found erroneous, it may have something to do with Meatgrinder’s NCX conversion process.

Thankfully I have one version sent to Apple already (minus the acknowledgement) so even if I fail to ever correct this, there will be a version of Dark Dreams for sale on the Apple store. Apple is the only vendor that requires this strict 100% compliance so I should really not fret too much about it since it is already available for sale there.

For now, loving the super conversion speed and thanking Mark Coker and his team for this amazing upgrade. Hoping the NCX errors will be fixed for the next upgrade as many eBooks don’t use a TOC.

Back in the crash of 2004, my computer crashing I mean, I lost all the poems I had written for the last 5 years. This was the bulk of my work and I was pretty devastated.

Recently I decided to catalogue my work properly and after 2 serious days of hunting for a solution, I found this program (free to try, no less!) MailNavigator which READ my backed up mailbox files and allowed me to export all the emails in one folder into a text file!

That is perfect for poetry as it retains all the line breaks and I can easily copy and paste them. Now the lengthy task of reading it all…

Many thanks to the developers of MailNavigator for saving my poems and for the free 30 day trial.

I’ve pretty much retired from writing poetry. So the next thing for me to do is to properly catalog the work I have done. And I confess I have been very tardy about it. Just the other night I pulled out a stack of magazines my work has appeared in and scratched my head on how to type all the poems out. Most of my poems were lost in a tragic 2004 computer death. I shed many tears over that. (Remember to back up your computer. Now.)

Anyway, I’ve been collating all my poems online and the remaining ones in some form of text from random files in my computer into Google Docs and Awesome Note, but the rest remain in print. Rather tired to type, I’m going to try this iPhone app OCRTOOL which appears to work as a scanner and converts the image to text.

Update: Just tested it. It works beautifully! No need to type my old poems. Just snap a photo of it (or use one from the photo album) and it corrects automatically to an accuracy rate of about 95%. Best $1.99 I spent on the App Store!

The Gathering, a rather satirical poem about stereotypes, has been sold to Poe Little Thing #4, which will out this December.

In other news, I will be the mother of a human child next May.